


II - Hope in the Blood.

by Flipdart



Category: Wearing the Cape Series - Marion G. Harmon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-28
Updated: 2015-03-28
Packaged: 2018-03-20 03:10:31
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,964
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3634407
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flipdart/pseuds/Flipdart
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Astra is down, but an old friend has her back.....</p>
            </blockquote>





	II - Hope in the Blood.

**Author's Note:**

> Astra and the Young Sentinels flood relief mission still isn't finished, but the next challenger has already appeared.... Violence and human conflict erupt in this instalment, Hope in the Blood!
> 
> I've been editing and rewriting this on and off for a few weekends... made some changes, corrected some errors and generally cleaned up.

Checking your work is a big part of search and rescue. Evacuations under pressure are always sheer bedlam, and the first priority of the emergency services is to get as many people out of danger as safely as possible. Only once that's achieved, then, if it’s safe to do it, you send people back to sweep for any stragglers. With most of the rural suburbs under two feet of filthy floodwater and six times the town’s normal population crammed into the square, checking the evacuated houses had been a lower priority. I’d volunteered, mostly because my heat vision and enhanced sensors meant I could do the checks quickly but also just to get away from Fairbanks for a while. If I spent much more time with him I was going to lose my Social Face completely.

 

I’d already picked up four groups - two of them Ozma had spotted with her seeing mirrors, which probably counted as an illegal search but whatever, and two I’d found on my own. three of them were elderly, always the group at highest risk in a crisis, and the other one had been a “family” of three kids whose parents were literally too drunk to realise the house had flooded around them. That had not been fun. I’d kept all of them company until the boats Major Payne attached me turned up, then flown them across. Long range flying while holding someone in my arms was something I’d learned to avoid - it was uncomfortable and often very frightening for them. I did give the kids a turn around their house, though.

 

I finished clearing the neighborhood and called Shelly, who was acting as our local dispatch controller as well as operating Galatea. When Shelly was wearing her Dispatch hat, it was strictly business.

 

“A2 to Shell, Sector three sweeps clear, no contacts no signals, Oz confirm please.”

 

“Copy A2, Oz sweeps sector three clear, no reflection, no trace. Sector four north northwest seven hundred -”

 

The rocket hit me square in the chest.

-

 

I was lying in mud and thorns, my gut was a ball of hot agony and I couldn’t breathe for the pain. My heart was beating so fast it thundered in my ears and I....

 

“MOVE!” hit me right in the hindbrain. I was kicking off into flight before I realised it was Shelly, and the ground erupted behind my feet and sent me crashing backwards. I hit a wall, went through it, and dropped back to ground clutching my stomach. I was covered in blood. I wanted to vomit but my diaphragm wasn’t working, I could barely get any air in my lungs. Someone had shot me. Twice. They were trying to kill me and they’d hit me with something that had cut through my breastplate and almost gutted me. I was bleeding so much I couldn’t even see how bad it was.  

 

“Shelly...”

 

“One guy, flyer, big rocket launcher, probably Atlas-class. He’s in the air and tracking you. Tsuris is three minutes away. He’s... DISPLACE!”

 

I floated upwards and started to move myself. I didn’t dare kick off again. Mistake. The roof fell on me as I started to fly and my would-be-killer landed right on my legs. I grabbed at him but I was slow and he punched me, aiming for my wound. He grazed my breastplate - that and the fact I was already moving backwards was the only reason that punch didn’t kill me. Instead he just sent me through another two walls and crashing to the floor. Something kept me from blacking out.

 

I was running on adrenaline, nothing else. I was pretty sure Shelly had hit me with something - I’d lost so much blood, and the wound was horrific, but I could still think and I could still move. I could track him now, my heat vision letting me see him through the walls. He was watching me. I needed to anticipate him, out-think him. All I needed was one clean hit....

 

He was a Atlas, but not as strong as me. B class, maybe even C, and if I hadn’t been bleeding to death from a mortal gut wound I’d have been able to take him in about five seconds. Either he’d run out of rockets or he was feeling very lucky to have tried to finish me up close.

  
  
  


I looked around. I had to have a weapon, something, anything I could hit him with. I’d been knocked into a kitchen pantry, there was nothing solid or heavy around, the flood was flooded, some pipes under the shelves, gas pipes, I could see an old fashioned meter... I rolled over, the paralyzing pain in my guts on the other side of a wall of thick glass in my head, grabbed at the gas meter and rolled back to lean against the wall, letting my hand drop under the water. He’d see the motion, know I was still alive, and either risk closing with me - potentially very dangerous for him - or back off and abort.  

 

He couldn’t afford much time to think, he had to decide before my team arrived, and here he came......

 

He didn’t risk a slow entry. He simply launched himself at the hole. He could see I still wasn’t dead, and he aimed to ram me right in the center of mass, where I’d been hit. But I could see him too, and as he came through the smoke I snapped my arm out and threw the heavy, old fashioned pig iron gas meter as hard as I could. It smacked him on the forehead and exploded into pieces, fifty pounds of metal doing maybe ninety miles an hour. He missed me and kissed the wall, landed badly and then I was on him. I just beat on him. My first punch broke his nose, the second smashed it flat, the third broke his cheekbone - The concrete floor cratered as his skull bounced repeatedly off it and the water around me turned red. I hit him in the face until I couldn’t lift my arms, until my fear went away and the pain came back, and then I finally fell off of him and curled into a ball of agony. I was done and he was gone. When Tsuris arrived saw the mess I’d made, he threw up.

  
  
  


\-----

**Jackie Bouchard, AKA Artemis**

 

“His name was Chu Shan Ti, and he was a professional assassin. The DSA had his DNA and a very large file on him. He was considered a high risk threat for a number of reasons, not least the fact that for several years he was on retainer to the Ring. He actually worked for all three of the Ring’s main backers at some point or other, firstly as a wetwork intel agent in China during the collapse, probably under government orders. After the fall of the central government he moved to the middle east, killed several persons of interest during the rise of the Caliphate and around then appears to have formally abandoned his previous national sponsor to become a paid freelancer. He gravitated to South America’s richer killing fields when things turned against the Caliphate, and spent several profitable years as an highly paid enforcer for the cartels. He was a mercenaries mercenary, always working for money and not choosy about his employers. The Ring connection is prominent but may not be relevant - practically anyone with sufficient cash and the right contact could have hired him.”

  
  


I was sitting in the secure room of Little Rock Air Force Base, which the DSA had acquired by ruthlessly kicking out everyone else. The base was swarming with people organising the flood response efforts on the Mississippi and the communications building was packed, but very little of all that effort required Top Secret clearance, so the Department of Superhuman Affairs had simply requisitioned the empty bunker and set up shop. We needed it. Astra had been unconscious since she reduced her would-be assassin’s head to a sagging broken pulp and Shelly used her future-tech neural gizmo to knock her out. We’d airlifted her straight to the base as soon as Ozma had waved her magic wand - literally, it was a wand and it worked by actual magic - and patched over the hole in her gut. She wasn’t healed, but it held while her team got her into the jet and flew her here. It was the closest place with both the medical staff and equipment to work on superhumans and enough security to ward off any further attempts on her life while she was out.

 

Astra was seriously fucked up. Chu had blown a hole in her, and she’d lost a big chunk of her intestine, liver and pancreas, along with basically every organ in her body being badly damaged by the concussion as well. Then Shelly had used the future tech (don’t ask) neural implant in her head to basically work her like a puppet, suppressing pain and flooding her abused body with adrenalin while Astra slaughtered the bastard. I’d seen his corpse. Shelly had saved Astra’s life. But it had made every injury ten times worse while she’d done it, as well as leaving pints of blood behind her, and now she was barely alive. Her regenerative power and a lot of work by a rapidly growing team of superpowered healers was keeping her from dying, but that was about it. They’d pumped her full of plasma and the surgeons were working in shifts, but she was still unconscious and full of holes. It was going to take time.  

 

New Orleans was having an even rougher time with the flooding than Barton was, and every Superhero down south was needed out on deck. Fortunately, despite some mistaken delusions on Astra’s part, I wasn’t even a little bit heroic. I was a free agent who found herself under DSA contract from time to time, and the rest of the time I was just a nice, unfriendly vampire with a 24 hour coffee shop to run. That meant that when the DSA called and told me Hope Corrigan, AKA Astra, had gotten herself shot up again, I was free to leave the Big Easy and come play bodyguard for my best and quite possibly only friend.

 

I was getting briefed by the DSA co-ordinator, along with an exhausted Chakra sitting next to me and Blackstone on a video link from the Sentinel Dome. Chakra had been carried down by Watchman all the way from Chicago. Literally carried, in his arms, because that was the fastest way to get to Little Rock without waiting for a jet. It was not a comfortable way to fly five hundred miles, but she was in a hurry. She’d been working on Astra for about twenty hours now, and between that and the flight wasn’t looking quite as stunningly, supernaturally hot as she normally did.

 

Shelly had spent the last day pulling information about Chu and asked the DSA for permission to lead the investigation. She hadn’t gotten it, but since they had no chance of stopping her hunting through their files anyway they’d drafted her as a specialist and made the best of it. The DSA was used to co-oping people like that. She’d been driving herself and everyone else crazy, anyway. Guilt, probably. She’d needed to work it out on someone.

 

The lead investigator the DSA had appointed was, at least, a professional. They’d pulled an FBI task force leader, Brent Bailey, and had been adding people to the team all day with disturbing urgency. I’d never heard of him, but he seemed at least competent. He looked tired, wearing a rumped but expensive italian suit while he gave his presentation.

 

“I’ve asked the Sentinels here both because you deserve the explanation and because I want to make sure we’re all on the same playbook tonight. Shelly’s digging has unearthed a lot over the last twenty four hours and some of it has serious national security implications, as well as a direct connection with the Sentinels.

 

The DSA are informed, at least, of any attack on a superpowered human in the USA. Astra has, as you're all obviously aware, been attacked with rocket fire before now by homegrown terrorist human supremacist groups. Until we identified the rockets used, this was considered a relatively routine case.

 

However.”

 

He clicked at the screen behind him and I got a good look at a big, heavy looking rocket launcher. It didn’t mean much to me.

 

“This is the Hector. It’s basically a heavily modified version of our longstanding standard man-portable anti-tank missile launcher, the Javelin. Its extremely heavily modified - every missile is hand-made by a pair of superhumans, a verne type mad scientist and a Merlin type Mage. Normally, Verne types and merlin types don’t mix well. This pair, however, got married three years ago. They're one of DARPA’s most prized assets, and the Hector is one of their babies.

 

Its basically an anti-superhuman missile. Most anti-aircraft missiles don’t work well against Atlas types - their warheads are designed to damage large and fragile aircraft, not human sized flying tanks. Anti-tank missiles have the armour-piercing warheads but lack the tracking ability of AA missiles - tanks rarely outrun rockets. The Hector has both thanks to Verne tech, as well as a magical charm that makes the launcher hard to spot and the missile supposedly impossible to miss. This missile is the U.S. government's response to Seif-al-Din.”

 

The man who killed Atlas, the original superhero and the strongest and best we’d had. Astra had nailed Seif-al-Din to the floor with his own sword after he’d killed Atlas. But he’d been a nightmare to stop. Astra had just been the one who finished him off - he’d taken down an army of superhumans before she got to him. I could see why they’d panic about the possibility of having to deal with another enemy like him.

 

“The weapon is rare, Top Secret, and only kept in secure arsenals at sensitive locations. Finding out that two of them had been used against one of our own Asset’s was a nasty surprise and got us scrambling to catch up.

 

The missiles are all tightly inventoried and fitted with tracer tags. Once we recovered fragments and identified one of the missiles we immediately I.D.ed the arsenal that was supposed to be holding it. A field team secured the site this morning and confirmed the theft. The tracer unit had been removed and fitted to an empty box, while the alarms and security had been bypassed. This obviously concerned us greatly.”

 

Um, yeah. Of the two problems, the fact that someone strolled in, and out, of a high security armoury without even setting off the alarm was bad enough. The fact they’d known what to steal and where was far worse. The first suggested a criminal with superpowers, a problem the DSA dealt with every day. The second suggested treason. Someone had given Top Secret information to a terrorist and helped them commit an assassination attempt against a major US asset. All hell would have been let loose when they figured that out.

 

“Six missiles were taken, with three launchers. Two of those weapons and one launcher were used in this attempt, leaving us with a major threat to our remaining Atlas-types. Frankly, Astra was lucky. The magic charm our Merlin type put on the missiles failed both times - The Sentinels standing protective ward appear to have rendered them harmless. Her armoured chest plate also disrupted the missile that hit her. None of the other Atlas types in the US routinely wear armour plate and most of them aren't as well warded. If someone else is targeted, the attempt will likely succeed. We’ve issued warnings, of course.”

 

Which they’d ignore. Atlas types treated danger as something that happened to other people. They wouldn’t take the threat seriously. To an extent, they couldn’t. Atlas classes were heroes - they were expected to face danger head on, with thrusting chests and hearty laughs. It was part of the image, the whole hero lifestyle they lived in public. Big, bold, confident - stupid, dangerous and media obsessed, but it was heady mix. Living the life could be addictive. Public adulation was a drug that could make you do very, very stupid things. One of the things I really liked about Astra was she was sensible. Even in her bright cobalt-blue costume with the padded bra.

 

Brent droned on for a little longer, but he didn’t have anything relevant to add and I was done listening. Brent’s job was to find the traitor and whoever was behind them, mine was just to keep my friend alive. Actually catching the bastards wasn’t my priority. And my paranoia was tingling. When the meeting broke up I grabbed Shelly and headed back to my post.

 

Astra was in what had been the base’s command bunker in the cold war and had been hastily retrofitted into a secure medical unit when they brought her in. As underground fortresses went, I’d seen better. It looked like a really grim government office block with no windows and spectacularly dreadful carpets. The ventilation was god-awful too. The team medic, doctor Beth, had flown in on a plane after Chakra and agreed. They’d shoved a bunch of worn out office furniture from the seventies to one side of an open plan office and pretty much set up a modern hospital block in the middle of it, complete with plastic sheeting creating sealed rooms with proper air filters in them. The sentinels had loaded up a cargo plane with just about every modern medical gizmo known to man and flown it directly to the base - all those licensing deals and action figures paid amazingly well. The medical staff had formed their own little room off Astra’s and were working from there.

  
  


She was a mess. Laying flat on her back on a hospital bed, she was covered below the chest by a tent over her stomach. They were still pumping blood into her - the smell of it was everywhere. Her wound had been re-opened by the surgeons so they could work on her insides and they’d left it open while they made sure she healed up right. She would heal. Atlas types got powers a mere vamp like me could only dream of, but I got a healing factor that even she couldn’t beat - I‘d been decapitated before now and gotten over it in a couple of days. We both bounced back quick if they didn’t finish us off properly. She’d probably take another month or so before she could kick my ass in a fight again, but unless someone put another rocket in her, she’d be just fine.

 

Of course, someone would try to put another rocket in her. They’d spent maybe three to five million dollars on the best assassin money could buy, broken into a Top Secret government armoury thus kicking up a hornet's nest of government security Agencies, and last but certainly not least pissed off the Chicago Sentinels, just to make Hope Corrigan dead. And they’d failed.

 

Someone willing to spend that much effort on killing Astra had a damn good reason to want her gone. I didn’t know what that reason was, but they were clearly committed to it. They would try again, if it was at all possible. I had to be ready for it. And the worst part was I knew who my worst enemy was already. It was the DSA.

 

Astra was not irreplaceable. Valuable, yes, but there were over a dozen A-class Atlas types in the USA, many of them working directly for the US government. If she died, it would be a tragedy, but not a disaster. They would be willing to contemplate risking her, if it won them a more valuable goal. Such as the identity of the persons who had penetrated their security so easily, apparently managing to get in and out of a federal armoury without detection and pry top secret information about a classified weapon system from their files.  

 

I was relying on security provided by people with a pressing desire to be attacked again. They were, I knew for a certainty, already leaking information about Astra and the base security to the usual suspects in the hope of baiting such an attempt. If our enemy tried here, the odds would be heavily if our favor. He’d be organising a second attempt at short notice. he’d be trying to strike a prepared defense in the middle of the largest concentration of troops in the region. And even if he succeeded and killed the woman who’d done more good for my fragile sanity than I could ever admit, they’d be a massive trail of fresh new evidence for the DSA to follow up on. The DSA won either way.

 

I needed to get Astra out of here. the Sentinel Dome in Chicago was the most heavily guarded, fortified and protected bunker in the US, without exception. Chicago had over a hundred Superheros who’d rain down on any attacker and the Sentinels and the Young Sentinels were the highest powered superhuman teams in the country. The trick would be getting her there without making her a target or letting the DSA hang her out to dry. I had some planning to do.

  
  


\--------

  
  


The wall exploded and sucked me out the hole in a horizontal hurricane as the cabin depressurized. I was dropping out of the sky with a broken wrist where I’d slapped the side of the hole before I had time to think.

 

I was spinning in mid-air while the wind roared in my ears and tried to gain some control of my headlong plummet. Another boom came from above I and caught a glimpse of the plane above me, streaming smoke on both sides of the fuselage. They were shooting at the plane. Suddenly the plane was shooting back, tracers from the two CIWS guns tracking behind the plane. I couldn’t hold myself steady enough to see what they were shooting at. The two lines of bright white light from the top and bottom of the plane converged, separated again, split up - they were tracking multiple incoming. Then a brief impression of white smoke connecting with the plane, and the right wing disintegrated.

 

We’d taken off at midnight, about half an hour ago. We’d considered moving astra overland, or even going down river and taking the really long sea-route, but both options would take days at least. None of her doctors had been happy about the idea of having her in transit for that long. Besides, aircraft were pretty safe, right? We’d accepted a ride from the DSA. It was an Air Force high value personnel transport, with flares, two small dual purpose point defense guns, and some pretty good electronic countermeasure gear. We’d checked it over, thoroughly, used four of the long-standing ex-military flight crew the sentinels maintained, and put a tight watch on the airport perimeter for AA fire.   

 

Apparently, we’d underestimated. We’d realised the airplane might get shot at on takeoff or especially landing, but we were being attacked mid-flight at forty thousand feet in the middle of the USA. That was just completely fucking impossible, except not, apparently. Jesus.

 

The plane dropped rightwards in a brutally sudden lurch. The remains of the wing dropped behind it, but the plane was losing altitude fast and spinning. Shelly was yelling in my earbug, but the monumental noisy gunfire and explosions had wrecked my hearing, plus I think I may have blown out my eardrums getting depressurised. Also, I wasn’t thinking so good right now. They’d shot down the fucking plane?!

 

Alright. Deal with it. Think think think. They were trying to kill Astra? Nope, wrong weapon. AA missiles were bloody useless against Atlas types. They just didn’t have the anti-armour capability. for that you needed... oh, shit.

 

I turned to Mist. Vampires didn’t get super speed, super strength or super toughness, but we we did hide pretty dang good. I also stopped plummeting to my second demise, a nice bonus. Just in time, too. About three seconds later I was shot.

 

It was actually pretty impressive to watch - a burst of bright light in the distance, rapidly growing, then suddenly a flurry of bright red bolts were going right through me. If I hadn't misted I’d be waking up in a coffin in a couple of months. Or possibly in a bucket. The storm of hot metal was gone before I could trace it, but then I didn’t have too - they opened up on the plane next. It was a fucking massacre. The tracers and high explosive rounds caught one wing, then lost it, tracked back as the plane lurched to one side, and finally nailed the fuselage, which exploded. They pummelled the fireball a little more, but they were obviously running out of ammo by that point - the standard anti-flyer round these days was a high velocity 35mm slug, and those things ate up volume and weight on an aircraft. What the hell was carrying those guns?

 

I de-misted. I couldn’t do much while I was Mist - It was useful for flying, if a bit slow, but it also let me heal up a little and catch my breath. My earbug came back with me, along, thankfully, with my hearing. Shelly was yelling in my ear the instant it reformed.

 

“what the hell are you still doing here, goddamn it?! Use the dust!”

 

The plan, right. But the plan assumed we’d be shot down by anti aircraft fire either right outside the airbase, where it would be the DSA’s problem, or more likely on landing in Chicago, where the rest of the Sentinels would be waiting to pounce. Instead they’d pulled off a mid air intercept somewhere over southern Illinoi. There was no backup force here, just us - or me, because the others had bugged out using Ozma’s “magic” travel dust the second they’d opened fire. Astra had arrived back home the same way an hour ago, about twenty seconds after we’d loaded her into the plane back in Arkansas.  We were bait without an actual trap in place, which sucked.

 

Technically, this was the air-force’s problem, but I couldn’t help but suspect whoever was firing at us had air force markings on. There really weren't many other people with AA missiles and 35mm chainguns around here. I wanted to see this.

 

“I’m staying. Tell Blackstone I’m going offensive as of right now. If the government is this badly compromised we carn’t expect them to do our work for us. Back me up?”

 

“...Finally. I was beginning to think you’d never shift that stake up your butt. Artemis, its nice to meet you again.”

 

“Uh huh. So anything helpful, or am I just going to get snarky comments out of you?”

 

“Air force radar has two bogies circling. I think I have an ID - there’s two Atlas type class C’s stationed in Nellis that I carn’t find. Both of them are on the convict service program, both have seriously criminal tendencies, and both of them are tagged with neck implants that are supposed to track them at all times.”

 

Oh shit. Shit shit shit. One our lovely, freedom loving, democratic government's brighter notions in the face of the utterly random distribution of superpowers to its citizens was to recruit criminal supervillians for the military. Violent, aggressive, often terrifyingly powerful and unstable psychopaths were now routinely offered get out of jail free cards and issued with high powered weaponry to fight for truth, freedom and the american way. They made great recruits. If they didn’t do what they were told they make great examples, too. They all had bombs planted on the base of their necks.

 

It was one of the dirtier bits of the brave new world we were living in, but there really weren’t a lot of other options. Even holding supervillains was absurdly dangerous, as well as ludicrously expensive. We either had to start executing superhumans for minor infractions or put them to work with a gun to their heads. Sending them off to fight our many, many enemies, and maybe helping them get psychological help too, “solved” both problems. I didn’t like it, but I didn’t like a lot of things. I’d learned to live with it.

 

Or die with it, of course. Dying was definitely an option, with two C class Atlas types armed to the teeth coming for me. That travel dust was lookin’ mighty tempting right now.

 

“Shelly, please tell me you have their killswitches.”

 

“Nope. Their court appointed handlers have them. I can get them from the Air Force, probably. I’m asking now. Might take awhile.”

 

“Just hack the bloody things!”

 

“Not happening. The kill code’s sixty digits long and the system will only let me try ten attempts a second. The universe will burn out before I brute force it like that.”

 

“Oh shit.”

 

\------------------------------------

 

They came in the kill. Two dark shadows in the dusk, I could barely see them circling about a hundred meters from the plane. They did not seem overly keen to close in and check the wreckage, shadowing it as it plummeted out the sky. With forty thousand feet to fall, we’d all be dropping for a while. They were facing the same dilemma the last hired killer had - it looked liked they’d done the job, but did they dare to check? The last guy to make that call was in a morgue right now.

 

The plane was shedding debris and disintegrating as it fell, but it was still the best cover around. I’d skydived a little and caught up with it before I Misted again, and now I was hiding in the wreck, watching them dither. I was a little surprised they hadn’t already split, but then they did have those collars... I was willing to bet whoever opened the armoury had gotten the coding for the bombs as well.  It was probably a Victory or Death kind of offer for these guys. Of course, their puppet master would probably trigger them anyway once he was sure Astra was dead. Loose ends, and all that.

 

I wanted them alive. I wanted some intact strings to follow. Strings....  Those collars, I suddenly realised, could give us a lead.

 

“Shelly. How much ECM equipment did the plane have on board? Is any of it still intact?”

 

“We packed the kitchen sink, but I’ve no idea if any of it still works. They shredded the plane. What are you thinking?”

 

“That someone has to be monitoring these guys, and those collars are going to be triggered at the end of this to keep them out of our hands. If I can get the ECM units back up, can you trace it?”

 

“......Possibly. Depends a lot on what kind of transmitter they use, but if I can hook into the NSA signals intelligence listening posts.... give me a few minutes. Forget the ECM on the plane, I can get a better read from the ground sites. Just buy me some time, Jacky, I’ve got some hacking to do.”

 

...Buy time. Why didn’t she just say “get shot”? It meant exactly the same thing. I had to convince the puppet master behind my new best friends to hold off on his little red button long enough for Shelly to get set. The only way to do that was to convince him the job wasn’t done yet. The only way to do that.....

 

The cabin was bent in two, riddled with giant holes and shredded metal and still burning in spots from the jet fuel sprayed across the rear edge when the tanks blew, but I found my problem solving kit wedged in a corner and miraculously untouched. A hefty thump got it open and I pulled out my new pride and joy, a Hector anti-cape missile launcher. I’d asked, then insisted, then just plain blackmailed the DSA into supplying one. Unfortunately I only had about an hour to read the manual on the plane and had... skipped a few bits. Screw it, it was a big fancy rocket with some magical junk crammed into it. Point and shoot. I hefted the thing - it was a good thing vamp’s got at least a little boosted strength, cus this thing weighed a ton - and wrested it, still in freefall, over to a handy hole. Thirty seconds of fiddling.....

 

“Crack!, thooooom-Boom!”

 

I hadn't factored in free fall. The backblast kicked me back into the plane and I lost the launcher tumbling backwards into the wreckage as the missile blasted into the night. I wasn’t about to go looking for it. I’d just pissed off one or two heavily armed Superhuman hardcases with guns. I Misted.

 

The volley of 35mm shells was entirely predictable and turned what was left of the plane from a burning ruin into a cloud of shrapnel. The plane pretty much vapourised around me as red hot tungsten and high explosive pummelled into it, a furious hail of metal that went on and on. I figured they must have dumped what was left of their ammo into the wreck when they stopped firing. I hoped they had - I could take a superhuman punch better than a few hundred 35mm rounds. Of course, they still had those missile launchers....

 

I waited. I had no idea if I‘d hit either of them but the charm the Merlin type put on it was supposed to guarantee it... I had no faith in magic however. Or Verne tech, for that matter. Both of them worked because their creators said they would, not because of any reasonable working principle. In a pinch, I didn’t even trust my own breakthrough powers to work if I didn’t have to. I prefered nice, reliable guns. They didn’t get complicated.

 

Nothing was happening. I was going to have to de-Mist and do something, before the puppet master decided the job was done and cut the strings. Problem was, I really didn’t want to. thanks to a not-so-minor miracle I wasn’t dead anymore, despite still being a blood drinking vampire, and while I was still pretty tough and healed fast I had no idea if I could die again. I didn’t want to die again. Being dead had sucked so bad...

 

I was falling behind the wreckage, now. If I waited any longer I’d lose the cover it gave and any heat sensor they had would show me materialise into a warm living human body. No option. I braced and went solid.

 

“You got one. His buddy peeled off to help him, but I think he’s KIA.” Shelly. she needed the earbug solid to transmit. I’d asked Ozma and Vulcan about fixing that, but they’d both said it was impossible. I didn’t see how it was any more impossible than anything else we did, but....

“I got permission to use two of the NSA listening posts in range and I’m chasing the signal off the collars. I also found an NSA satellite that already seemed to be taking an interest in you.”

 

“I don’t see them.”

 

“Well if you wore the contact lenses I could show you.”

 

“...I’m plummeting out of the sky, I’m not putting bloody contact lenses in! Now where is he?”

 

“North northwest, twenty five hundred meters lateral and about five kilometers vertical. they're falling behind. I think he might be bugging out.... oh. Thank you. His collar just got pinged... warning shot. I think someone just yanked his leash and told him to get back on the job. I’m tracking it backwards now, just try not to kill him.”

  
“Not an issue!”

**Author's Note:**

> Aaaand that's your lot, for the moment. how is Artemis getting out of this one? what happens next? well I haven't written it yet, so I've no idea. but I'm sure it'll be fun!


End file.
